Asian languages

Asian and Oriental languages include simplified Chinese (in use in the People's Republic of China), traditional Chinese (in use in Taiwan), Korean and Japanese.

The relating scripts do not use alphabets but pictograms (commonly called ideograms).
A Western font such as Helvetica weighs 28 kilobyte, while a typical Japanese font such as Mincho will weigh around 8.5 megabyte (around 8,500 kilobytes) for a text of 2000 pictograms. Such texts require 2-byte codes, unlike Western languages that require 1-byte codes.
An element shared by all the above languages, therefore, is this use of double-byte fonts, which cannot be managed by all software applications. Certain desktop publishing programs, such as Adobe PageMaker and QuarkXPress, require local versions in order to manage individual Oriental languages. A layout produced using the Chinese version of QuarkXPress, therefore, cannot be used on the corresponding Western version.
Soget has developed solutions to write in one or more Oriental and Western languages within a single document.

Need a translation in Chinese, Japanese or Korean ? Need an Japanese, translator or interpreter ? Need an Chinese text in QuarkXpress or InDesign ? Click here for an estimate within 24 hours !

Given that written documentation and websites require continual text and graphic integrations, it is important that programs such as PhotoShop and FreeHand should also enable Oriental texts to be produced.
Soget creates and translates all graphical products, both in bitmap or vector format, in Chinese, Korean and Japanese languages.

Unicode has recently defined a code for all the main Oriental fonts, and the most important font producers have released Opentype font families known as CJK (acronym of Chinese, Japanese and Korean) that include all the pictograms required to write in the three languages.

Example of Chinese (simplified and traditional),
Japanese and Korean script using a single font

As for Western scripts, there are many Oriental font families, including serif, sans serif and italic typefaces. The highest quality font families come in different weights (W), corresponding to the following: normal, light, extra light, bold, extra black, etc.

Example of differently weighted Japanese fonts

Soget owns various CJK font families for the production of technical and image-related documentation.

Producing web pages requires the allocation of appropriate page codes (GB2312 for simplified Chinese, Big5 for traditional Chinese and Shift-Jis for Japanese) or Utf-8.
The use of Web graphics in Oriental countries is somewhat different to that in the West. Soget creates brand new culture-oriented websites, and extends the localisation process to include aesthetic and cultural elements.

We also deliver simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Korean and Japanese translated technical documentation designed for print publishing and we are equipped with all IT resources required to produce texts, in the CJK script, in Ms-Word and other word processing programs, as well as in CAD drawings, in Avi, Flash movies and PDF formats.

We fully support most commercial Dtp programs on both Windows and Macintosh operating systems, including Adobe InDesign, FrameMaker, Interleaf Quicksilver (Unicode release), Ms-Publisher, QuarkXPress (Chinese, Korean and Japanese releases) and design applications such as CorelDraw, Adobe Illustrator, Freehand, Fireworks, PhotoShop etc.

Finally, we can create or migrate simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Korean and Japanese documentation in XML, SGML and HTML.